Race Course Road: A Novel

by Goswami, Seema

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  Halfway across the country, Asha Devi was relishing every moment of the campaign. Thanks to the strong-arm tactics of Harsh Gulati, her campaign manager, her schedule finally had a semblance of logic to it. Today, she was stationed in Calcutta, from where she would make helicopter forays to some of the adjoining districts to hold a series of meetings. But first, there was a huge rally to address in Calcutta itself.

  Instead of checking into a hotel, where both her security and privacy could well be compromised, she was staying at the sprawling Alipore bungalow of a local party leader. The family had obligingly moved out so that Asha and her staff could move in, leaving behind their liveried servants to take care of her every need.

  She had an early start today, having set up a series of meetings with local party leaders with Madan Mohan’s help, so the knock on her bedroom door came on the dot of 6 a.m. The maid came in with a tray, holding her usual black coffee, brown toast and a single hardboiled egg.

  Asha reflexively put on the TV as she settled down to her sparse breakfast. A re-run of Manisha Patel’s Election Special programme was on as she tuned in to AITNN. Manisha was walking backwards doing a piece to camera, while Jayesh held a roadside meeting at a chai stall in the background.

  ‘Jayesh Sharma has decided to take the fight for his political survival to the streets,’ said Manisha, finally coming to a halt in front of an auto-rickshaw with a poster of Jayesh on it. ‘He has realized that rallies and rath yatras are too impersonal a way to connect with the people of India. So, he has decided that padayatras are the way to go.’

  Yeah, right, thought Asha, raising a wry smile. It had nothing to do with the fact that Jayesh’s last five rallies had been embarrassing in their lack of attendance. Of course not!

  Manisha was continuing with her instant political analysis: ‘In one way, at least, this has been a masterstroke on Sharma’s part. He has managed to deflect attention from the fact that his rallies were considerably less successful that Asha Devi’s.’

  Huh, thought Asha, finally! Here’s some truth from the media.

  ‘But, in a more important sense,’ Manisha went on, ‘he has managed to project himself as a man of the people, the man who actually walks the streets while his political rivals stay divorced from reality as they helicopter themselves from one rally to another.’

  Asha sat up straighter. Now that was as direct a hit at her as had been delivered of late. But to be honest, she had expected no less. She had steadfastly refused to return Manisha’s many phone calls and emails. And her office had made it clear to Varun Kapoor, the Delhi socialite who had tried to intercede on her behalf, that there was no question of Asha Devi’s sitting down for an Oprah-style chat with Manisha Patel.

  If Manisha wanted to cover Asha’s campaign, she would have to tag along with the rest of the press party and take her sound bites where she found them. Clearly, the snub had not gone down well with the prima donna of Indian news television.

  Well, thought Asha, shutting off the TV, she could care less. The media had never been her friend. And she was damned if she was going to become friends with the media now. Her strategy was to appeal directly to the people, and so far it was working just fine.

  Manisha may scoff at helicopters, she may sneer that they were an elitist mode of transportation that didn’t allow politicians to connect with the masses. But what did journos like Manisha know about the rigours of politics? Or how challenging it was to mount an election campaign in this country?

  The truth was that in a large nation like India, where remote areas were not connected to airline networks, helicopters were the only way to cover huge swathes of ground in an efficient and organized manner, making the most of every single moment in the campaign trail. And, Asha acknowledged to herself, it didn’t hurt that a helicopter landing became something of a tourist attraction in rural areas that had never seen one before in real life. She particularly loved the look of awe and wonder in the eyes of the watching children, as they stared open-mouthed as she made her descent from the sky.

  Today, though, Asha was using a much more modest form of transportation—the humble Ambassador car. It was a tight fit inside, with her two PSOs taking up too much space as usual, while the rest of her SPG contingent followed in the next car.

  An hour later, stationed at the podium for her first rally of the day, Asha cast a satisfied eye on the crowd—which had to number around 80,000—that stretched out further than her eyes could see. This may be Poriborton Party territory, the personal fiefdom of its firebrand leader, Sukanya Sarkar, but people had still turned out in droves to catch a glimpse of Asha and to hear what she had to say. The realist in Asha knew that this attendance wouldn’t necessarily translate into votes, but it was rather heartening despite all that.

  The chants of ‘Asha, Asha, Asha’, reverberated in the air, as the LJP party flags fluttered high in the breeze. Asha wiped the sweat off her brow with the pallu of the cream and grey tangail sari she was wearing. The heat was bad enough, but the humidity was truly stifling. She was pretty sure that the sweaty patches under her arms were visible to the crowd. But this was no time to worry about petty embarrassments. She raised her arms to wave to the crowd, to make the victory sign, and then put them together in a namaskar, bowing low in a show of respect.

  She waited for the cheering to die down a bit before she began with her speech. ‘Amar priyo bondhugon, aapnader shobaike amar namaskar!’

  As she had expected, her greeting in flawless Bengali brought the cheering crowd to its feet yet again. Thank God for her first nanny, Radha didi, who had spent the first six years of Asha’s life crooning sweet nothings to her in her native Bengali.

  After that, she had the crowd in the palm of her hand. And Asha Devi played them like the political virtuoso she had so rapidly become.

  TEN

  Funnily enough, the story that would shake up the Indian political system broke on a French news channel. It was 11.35 a.m. in India when France 24 began running pictures of senior executives of the aviation giant, L’Oiseau, being arrested at their homes, frogmarched into police cars, and taken to the police station to be charged with crimes ranging from tax evasion to bribery. The deal in question: the sale of thirty-five L’Oiseau fighter jets to India.

  It took just five minutes for every news channel in India to crash its regular coverage to run the footage, accompanied by breathless commentary.

  The story had been brewing for a while. As soon as the contract was signed just over a year ago, all of Lutyens’ Delhi (the political, bureaucratic, industrial, media cabal that effectively ran the capital) had been agog with rumours of bribe-taking and corruption. The suspects ranged all the way from the Defence Minister to the Air Force special committee that had been tasked with testing the different fighter jets in the running for the contract.

  Opinion was divided on whether Birendra Pratap was in on it. Some were certain that as Prime Minister he would have had to give clearance before the purchase went ahead. Others, who believed implicitly in his incorruptible image, thought Birendra Pratap had discreetly averted his eyes while Madan Mohan got up to his usual shenanigans.

  So, the best-case scenario was that the PM was complicit; worst case, he was corrupt. Or so went the consensus in the drawing rooms of the rich and powerful in the city.

  But nobody thought that was a big deal. In fact, this kind of speculation and rumour-mongering was par for the course when it came to defence deals in India, no matter which party was in government. So the members of the Delhi elite merely shrugged their shoulders, poured themselves another glass of Chardonnay and carried on with their lives.

  The story only became public a month later. The first leak came from a disaffected employee in the defence ministry. An anonymous Twitter handle called @AirForceWB—the WB standing for whistle-blower—sent out a series of tweets detailing how L’Oiseau had clearly been the inferior fighter jet on a number of parameters. But nevertheless, it had officially sco
red over all its rivals, because the company had agreed to kickbacks that would be routed back to the principals in India.

  These tweets were quickly picked up by the media, and in ten minutes had been retweeted more than 2,000 times. In another five minutes, they were being flashed on the banners of all the TV channels, while news websites did quick, snappy stories built around them. By then, all the journalists on Twitter had begun DMing (direct messaging) @AirForceWB to get more information. None of them got any response. Instead, in another half an hour, the account was deleted, taking the controversial tweets with it.

  But while tweets can be deleted, screenshots live on forever. And they formed the basis of the media coverage that followed.

  That evening’s TV news was dedicated to the L’Oiseau deal, or as Gaurav Agnihotri dubbed it, the ‘scandal of the century’. By the time Gaurav’s panel had done its ‘debate’ on the issue, and duly fulminated on the culture of bribes and kickbacks that flourished in the defence ministry, the figure of illicit gains being bandied about was in the billion-dollar range (even though the deal itself ran shy of eight billion euros). But even allowing for the hyperbole of TV channels, this was a substantial scandal involving stupendous sums, and for a week or so nobody had written or discussed much else.

  Manisha Patel had done a special documentary on defence scandals, going all the way back to Bofors, pegged on the controversy surrounding the L’Oiseau deal. The Indian Express had sent its crack investigative team to Toulouse and Paris to find out the truth behind the allegations. And the amateur sleuths on social media had run amok with various conspiracy theories, most of which centered on who @AirForceWB was and whether he or she was still alive.

  But then, as no new evidence emerged over the next few months, the hyperactive kids of the media world had been diverted by newer, shinier objects. With every fresh sensational scandal that hit the headlines, the L’Oiseau story got less and less traction. It was slowly but surely demoted from the front pages and prime-time discussions. And after the shock of the Birendra Pratap assassination, followed closely by the announcement of fresh elections, it had disappeared completely from public view.

  And now, just a day after the first round of polling was over—in which internal exit polls gave the LJP an astounding victory, with an astonishing vote share of 52 per cent—L’Oiseau was back with a bang. And much to the Indian media’s delight, they didn’t even have to do much investigative work on it. The French media had already done all the heavy lifting; all they needed to do was to translate their work into English (or the appropriate regional Indian language).

  The facts were pretty straightforward. A few months after the L’Oiseau deal had been signed last year, the French anti-corruption department, the Agence Francaise Anti-Corruption (AFA) had received an anonymous tip. The CEO of L’Oiseau, Michel Philippe, had opened a numbered bank account in Switzerland in which a deposit of twenty million euros had been made. The company itself had made a payment of sixty million euros to another numbered bank account in Lichtenstein, the beneficiary of which was yet to be identified. But the timing suggested that this payment was related to the Indian fighter jet deal.

  The French had investigated and traced the Philippe account to a small privately-held bank, situated on Zurich’s Banhoffstrasse. It was weeks before they procured a court order to get the bank to divulge the details of the account, during which period the account was wiped clean of all its money. But all money—legal or illegal—leaves a virtual trail in the world of e-banking. And forensic accountants soon traced it to an account in the Bahamas. The beneficiary of the account was a privately-held company on the island. Michel Philippe’s name was nowhere on the paperwork and he, of course, denied all knowledge of the account and the money deposited therein.

  The investigation hit a brick wall at this stage. But just when it looked as if the case would be closed, the French investigators had a lucky break. A month ago, the chief financial officer of L’Oiseau, Francois Pollet, had been hauled up by the authorities on tax evasion charges. Terrified at the thought of serving a jail term, he had asked if he could cut a deal. In exchange for a light sentence to be served in a minimum-security facility, he would serve up his CEO, Michel Philippe, on a silver platter. The negotiations were long and protracted but finally an agreement was hammered out. And Pollet began to sing like the proverbial canary.

  Pollet had names. He had dates. He had the swift codes that had been used to move the money around. He had a pen drive on which the details of all these transactions were stored—his insurance in case things ever went south. And the French had their man.

  And today, in full view of the TV cameras (the media having been discreetly tipped off in advance), Philippe was arrested early in the morning and hauled into police custody. Pollet was also picked up, to keep his cover intact. As were a couple of members of the L’Oiseau board, who were believed to have had knowledge of the deal.

  Now, the only mystery that remained to be solved was who was behind the Leichtenstein account. The listed beneficiary was a law firm by the name of Schuster and Sullivan. But there was little doubt that the money had been intended for an Indian: either an arms dealer, a middleman of some sort, somebody in the armed services, a politician, or maybe all of the above. But by the time the French authorities got involved, the sums in that account had been moved out to an account in the Bahamas (clearly a popular destination among arms dealers) and the money was long gone from there as well.

  The French media, mindful of the strict libel laws in their country, were playing it safe and not making any direct allegations as to who had been the ultimate beneficiary of the Liechtenstein account, restricting themselves to pointing to murky Indian entities.

  But the Indian media did not have any such problems. As far as they were concerned, they had their man. And his name was Madan Mohan Prajapati. He had been Defence Minister when the deal was signed. So the big bucks, as it were, stopped at his bank account, wherever in the world it may be.

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  Karan Pratap had spent the night at home in Race Course Road after what seemed like an age. Now that the first round of polls was done and the second phase was nine days away, he thought that he was entitled to a bit of a break, after all the non-stop campaigning he had done in the last week.

  So, Karan had cleared his schedule for the morning. It was a Saturday and he wanted to spend some time with his daughters and his wife until lunchtime before his afternoons became swamped (yet again!) with meetings with the cabinet secretary, the national security advisor and the cabinet committee on security.

  Kavya and Karina had already gone to bed by the time he had arrived the night before. But they were so excited at the prospect of being reunited with their father that they were up at 6 a.m., without anyone having to shake them awake (as was usually the case). And at 6.30 a.m., over the protestations of their nanny, they came tumbling into their parents’ bedroom, diving right under the duvet to plaster their father’s face with kisses.

  Karan felt his tiredness fall away as he was pummelled by two pairs of tiny hands. ‘Wake up, Daddy! Daddy, wake up,’ was their incessant chant as he faux groaned and snuggled deeper into the bedsheets. Radhika let out an indignant yelp as a rouge child foot hit her in the ribcage. ‘Calm down, girls,’ she shouted, trying her best to sound indignant. But her joy in having her whole family squashed into one king-size bed was writ large on her face. So, after one anxious look to check her mood, the girls went right back to torturing their dad.

  After feigning sleep for a couple of minutes, Karan suddenly leapt up and tucked each kid under either arm, pretending to throttle them, even as they giggled helplessly. Radhika felt as if her heart would burst as she looked at her daughters and her husband mock-fighting on the bed. How precious these moments were. And how few would be left to them now that Karan was Prime Minister and would remain so for the foreseeable future.

  The secure phone beside Karan’s bedside began buzzing even as the maid ar
rived with the breakfast tray. Radhika shooed the girls out so that they could go brush their teeth and give their father privacy. A call on that particular phone always heralded one crisis or another.

  Karan answered with a testy, ‘Hello.’ All he had wanted was one morning with his family. Was that too much to ask?

  But as he listened to the voice on other end, his expression changed from faintly irritated to completely livid. It was clear to Radhika, listening to his end of the conversation, that this was not good news.

  Karan hung up abruptly and then called his private secretary on his secure line. He needed to see Madan Mohan Prajapati. And he needed to see him now.

  But it was only an hour later that Madan Mohan presented himself at the gates of Race Course Road. His car was waved through and in a couple of minutes he entered the main drawing room of 5, Race Course Road, where the Prime Minister awaited him in a mood of barely-suppressed fury.

  Madan Mohan looked only mildly intrigued at the sight. He had no idea that the French Ambassador had called the PMO early in the morning to warn the Indian government about the arrests expected later in the day in the L’Oiseau deal. And that he had indicated (strictly off the record) that the French believed that the money trail would lead back to someone high up in the Birendra Pratap Singh government.

  You didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the reference was to the Defence Minister Madan Mohan Prajapati.

  But Madan Mohan didn’t know any of this. So, he settled down with his customary sigh, radiating the discontent of a man who has been hauled out of bed at an unreasonable hour for no good reason.

  That mood didn’t last long. As Karan began recounting his office’s exchange with the French, Prajapati’s face darkened with each new detail. By the time Karan had got to the Lichtenstein angle, Madan Mohan interrupted, ‘I can assure you that I will investigate this with all the power at my disposal. The people behind the deal will not go unpunished.’